Want your own Edubuntu weblive ?

Since I announced Edubuntu WebLive 8000 users have been testing Edubuntu using it.

After a bit of cleaning up and packaging, I’m now pleased to announce that the source code for both our Drupal plugin and the XML-RPC daemon is available on Launchpad: https://code.launchpad.net/vmmanager.

Drupal plugin

Features:

• Provider the user interface for Weblive, like the one on: http://www.edubuntu.org/vmmanager
• Gives a basic administration interface to enable/disable the NX servers and update all the text shown in the user interface
• Code is PHP using the Drupal form APIs and php-xmlrpc to contact the ltsp-cluster-agent plugin

Installation is relatively trivial, just follow the README file in the branch.

ltsp-cluster-agent plugin

Features:

• XML-RPC service (authenticated and using HTTPS) that Drupal uses to create new users
• Database of all accounts ever created, their status and expiry time
• Support for multiple SSH servers
• Client to query the database (also over xml-rpc) to gather statistics or manually create/remove accounts
• Code is python, using paramiko for SSH and storm+sqlite as ORM

Installation is straightforward as everything is packaged here: https://launchpad.net/~stgraber/+archive/experimental

ltsp-cluster-agent is a python daemon designed for use by LTSP and LTSP-Cluster. More on that in a later post.

The VM itself

For Edubuntu, our VMs are entirely automatically generated using debian-installer preseeding and KVM.
Unfortunately these scripts are not clean enough yet for me to release them, I’d expect to have them out very soon though.

The basic requirement for the VM is to have these packages installed:

• ltsp-cluster-accountmanager (used to cleanup session leftovers)
• freenx-server (the NX server)

We have recent versions of both in Revolution Linux’s PPA. ltsp-cluster-accountmanager is also in the archive since karmic and I’m hoping for freenx-server to enter the archive soon.

I’d also recommend removing the following packages as they caused some issues with Edubuntu WebLive:

• network-manager, network-manager-gnome, network-manager-pptp, network-manager-pptp-gnome
• jockey-common, jockey-gtk
• rtkit

As usual, comments, patches and bug reports are welcome. I’d also be happy to hear from other deployments of WebLive !